The fall-to-spring TV season has ended, the networks have picked their new series, the first summer cable shows have launched, and we re done talking about The Sopranos. So, it s time to look at what s happening in every TV executive suite in Hollywood and New York. People are going nuts.
More like, What could go wrong next? The television world, like a lot of industries and people, has gotten itself slapped silly by that little thing called technology, and the immediate concern is that ratings seem to be down - and seem is the operative word, which we ll get to. For the major broadcast nets, total viewership looks to be down by as much as 2 million people this past season.
The broad and obvious explanations are 1) viewers are more fickle than ever because they have so many entertainment and information choices, and 2) that darn technology just keeps changing the planet. But it breaks down into more specific problems, so here s a short course in the woes facing TV networks. And this isn t going to be just a running joke about their bungling.
The nets have bungled plenty, but they also do a lot of things right. Let s start with the ratings. You could explain the drop in a lot of old-school ways.
The lack of entertainment magic might be one reason. No show really popped out to bring in a tide of viewers and raise all boats, as the saying goes. Even Fox s American Idol dipped after a hot start, partly because the singers were a bit less exciting.
Another legit reason was that daylight savings started three weeks early. Don t roll your eyes, and you know you were going to. But more light means more time outside - softball leagues started earlier, people went for walks or just hung in the yard - and less time on the couch.
But it also may be that the drop wasn t all that big. Instead, viewers used that new-fangled technology to change the way, and the times, that they watched. And the reason this is such a problem for the networks is that they can only guess about this.
It s likely many people just went somewhere else for their entertainment - Web sites, video games, DVD rentals and the like. Those are people lost to TV, at least for now. But some of those DVDs they watched were of TV shows, and now we re getting into the more tangled part.
Plenty of people wait for the season of, say, 24 to end, then they rent the DVD and watch it all at once. Others record shows on video cassettes, or digital recorders like TiVo, and watch them later that night or that week. Nielsen has started to measure the digital recorders (DVRs), and says the ratings for many shows grow by 10 percent when you count in the delayed viewing.
That does not include VHS recordings, which are impossible to track. (Because DVRs are digital, they can be counted by codes embedded in the feeds - trust me, you don t want me trying to explain the details of that - but only 17 percent of homes have DVRS. When that number grows, ratings should get a lot more accurate.
) The dilemma for everyone in the TV business is, how do they account for and charge for the delayed viewing? Nielsen Media Research has begun to rate the actual commercials, but that comes with problems, too. Networks and advertisers are haggling over the value of seeing an ad days or even a week late.
Plus, the only ratings on delayed ad-viewing comes from DVR users, and those people probably don t represent the demographic makeup of the entire audience. As for DVD sales, they re far less valuable, in terms of actual dollars and in predictability. The DVDs don t even come out until the season ends, and it s a roll of the dice for networks to leave a show on the air on the bet that lots of folks will buy it later.
Next problem: Among all these ratings concerns is the death of the rerun. Once again, people have too many other choices than to watch a show twice, though with some comedies and self-contained hours like a CSI or a House, viewers will go back to see episodes they ve missed. But serialized shows, such as Lost or Heroes or the recently resurrected Jericho, are a bigger concern, and they create a management problem for networks.
Those kinds of series can t even afford one bad patch during the season, because it will drive viewers elsewhere - 24, for instance, dropped a couple million viewers during a particularly dull side trip into stupid political plotting - and repeats can nearly kill them. But the season is 36-plus weeks long, and most dramas can only produce 22 to 24 episodes in a year because of the cost and because of the time needed just to make the episode. (An average hour of TV takes a minimum eight days to produce.
) So, ABC s Lost, CBS Jericho and NBC s Heroes all took some kind of midseason break, on the theory that the networks could keep viewers tuned to the time slot with new episodes of another show, then re-launch their hot shows in early spring. Instead, all three suffered badly. Heroes and Lost dropped more than 2 million viewers; Jericho went down by about 4 million.
The breaks weren t the only reason for the drops. American Idol launched and stole viewers from everyone. Still, don t expect to see that trick again.
ABC will hold back Lost until midseason and run it straight through into May. Even more creative is NBC s plan for Heroes. It s creating a semi-spinoff called Heroes: Origins, which will be a separate six-week series existing in the Heroes universe, and eventually, it ll send a character to the mother show.
If there is any good for viewers in this whole mess, it s that networks are looking for that kind of inventiveness. If NBC s Heroes plan works at all, lots of new shows will be developed with that sort of mini-spinoff attached. The irony is, the guy who oversaw the Heroes plan during the spring, then-NBC entertainment president Kevin Reilly, was fired a month ago.
And that s our real lesson for today: It s not so easy running a television network. On the other hand, while you last, the pay is pretty good. The fall-to-spring TV season has ended, the networks have picked their new series, the first summer cable shows have launched, and we re done talking about The Sopranos.
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